


The Game We Love

by seblaiens



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Cheating, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 05:41:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8359396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seblaiens/pseuds/seblaiens
Summary: Rafe would have been happy to keep pretending.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kpkndy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kpkndy/gifts).



Rafe sneaks into their hotel room, careful to not open the door too wide, just enough to slip through. He doesn’t want to wake Nadine up by letting too much light into the room; she’s a light sleeper, easily startled by any noise or movement. He thinks himself lucky she’s never woken up before when he returned; there are things he doesn’t need her to know.

This is one of them.

He closes the door without a sound, taking off his shoes at the door and carrying them into the room, silently walking over the floor and towards the bed, where he takes off the rest of his clothes and lets them fall onto the floor, before wordlessly slipping under the covers of the bed. He can see her body, framed by the moonlight that is shining through a small parting of the blackout curtains - the dip of her waist and the beautiful curve of her ass. He asks himself why she isn’t enough for him.

Rafe is painfully aware of his breathing, a little labored from his brisk walk through the halls of the hotel room and his nerves. His body is humming, almost vibrating, and he’s scared that it’ll somehow wake Nadine up. He needs to get up before her, take a shower, and let his clothes disappear - he stinks of cigarette smoke. He’s almost tempted to get up now and do it now, but it would be hard to explain why he’s washing himself in the middle of the night - any explanation he could come up with, she’d still see through him.

He turns on his side and sighs, reaching out to check his phone. Two in the morning. His alarm is set for six. He’ll get less than four hours of sleep, even if he passes out right this moment, and he needs a good excuse as to why he’s so tired. Maybe he could blame it on nightmares, wake her up right now and start the lie by cuddling against her and telling her he can’t go back to sleep. No, he remembers. He still smells like him.

Nadine stirs behind him, and Rafe holds his breath. A sigh, then she’s pressed against his back, her hands coming around his waist as she nuzzles her nose between his shoulder blades, resting her forehead against him. She’s awake, he knows her well enough to know this, but if she falls asleep soon she won’t even remember it tomorrow. He tries to keep as still as possible, his muscles cramping, until he can feel her even breathing against his skin. His heart is racing a mile a minute as he relaxes.

“Where were you?”

It’s as if ice water was thrown over Rafe’s body. Her voice is so clear, not scratchy from sleep at all; she’s probably been awake all this time, figuring out if he’s going to say something or not. Rafe licks over his lips before speaking, his voice cracking slightly.

“Go back to sleep.”

Nadine moves away from him, turning on the light above the table on her side. He doesn’t turn towards her, stays lying on his side, staring straight ahead at the wall.

“Rafe, don’t treat me like I’m dumb.”

“Nadine,” he says, sighing, “you don’t want to hear me say it. You already know.”

He hasn’t tried to keep it a secret, exactly. Yes, he sneaks back into the room and prays for her to be asleep every time, but during the day, when he looks at Sam a little too long, when their  touches linger just a second more than they need to, he doesn’t try to pretend that it is nothing. He wouldn’t lie to her like that; wouldn’t keep up a theatre of trying to appease two people at once.

“You were with Drake?” She asks anyway, and Rafe presses his lips together to keep himself from talking. “Didn’t think he’d be… your type.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you,” he says eventually, not wanting her to have the last word.

“I’m not jealous, I’m curious. About the things you were doing. With him. Without me.”

Rafe laughs, finally turning onto his back and looking at her. She’s beautiful - her hair wrapped tightly in a bun, only wearing a tight fitting tank top. She’s looking at him, expecting an answer, but he’s not sure what to say. He doesn’t believe her - of course she’s jealous, who wouldn’t. They might have never said the words, but this relationship is as serious as it can get, between them. It’s not his style to twist the knife even deeper and tell her about exactly all the things Sam does to him behind closed doors. Things she’s not able to give him.

Rafe wonders once again why just one person never seems to be enough for him. Maybe he does like hurting them both by stringing them along, only giving them enough attention to keep them content but never satisfied. He can’t deny he loves the subtle fighting between them; who gets to sit next to him, who’s the one Rafe will go to if he has a problem.

He’s not a good person. He never said he was.

“I like spending time with him,” Rafe answers. “He’s… easy to be around.”

Nadine laughs, hurt. “It’s hard to be around me?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“What’s so special about him? Is it that atrocious tattoo on his neck? Is it the smoking?” Nadine gets up from the bed and puts on her clothes, her hands shaking slightly, Rafe can see. “Wouldn’t have pegged you as someone who falls for the bad boy.”

Rafe sits up and crosses his arms. He doesn’t want to fight about it. He would have been happy to keep up the lie, never once confrontating one of them about what was happening. Happy to keep the peace.

“What are you doing?” He asks, watching as Nadine pulls up her trousers, her beautiful ass disappearing beneath the baggy fabric.

“I’m going out.”

“Nadine, come on-” he says as he gets off the bed, walking over to her, but she stops him by raising her palm and shaking her head.

“Save it.”

“What did you think this was?” Rafe asks, laughing at her. “I never did anything to make you think that this was more than just sex.”

He’s lying through his teeth, he knows. He’s bought her clothes and jewelry, took her out to fancy dinners and drove her around town in a limousine with bulletproof windows to show her his favorite parts of New York. Things he’s never done with Sam. Because there was something between her and him that wasn’t there when he bent over for Sam - mutual respect, something more than trying to grasp at straws of a relationship long gone by. She’s something special, he realizes, and he feels his heart sink as she laces up her boots.

“Nadine, stop behaving like a child.”

She snorts, and Rafe is sure that, if she had less self-control, she’d have turned around and slapped him. He deserves it, for sure, even wishes he would show a little more emotion towards him, even if it is just anger. She’s always so… in control. He admires it about her, but he wishes more often than not that she’d be a little weaker, easier to manipulate.

He wouldn’t have to watch her walk out of the hotel room if she was just like any of the other girls he’d picked out before. But then, he also wouldn’t have cared if any of them had left before he had.

“Goodbye Rafe,” and she closes the door behind him, letting him stand there in only his underwear, forced to watch her leave. He’s too perplexed that she actually left to get angry - surely she can’t be serious; there’s no way she would leave him over this, would she?

Rafe lets out a chuckle, sure that it would only take a few seconds for her to change her mind and come crawling back to him. So he waits.

He waits until his legs start hurting and he has to sit down. And when the sun comes up around five in the morning, she still hasn’t come back.


End file.
